How to obliterate your opponent in Shogi as fast as possible

Struggling to reach 100% because of the shogi minigame? Defeat Yakuza's Shogi AI with an even better Shogi AI!

COMPLETION LIST ONLY TRICK

I originally made this guide purely to help others 100% the completion list since you need to win 5 games of Shogi for 100% and I wasn't aware of an even easier way to complete that task.

As it turns out, the Challenge Mode AI is EXTREMELY predictable. If you make the same moves every time, your opponent will also make the same moves in response. You can actually consistently beat Challenge 1 with the same moves every time in just a few seconds, and every time you beat it without take-backs it counts towards completion. Eternal praise to the legendary CyricZ on GameFAQs for figuring this out. You can either go take a look at his instructions for winning Challenge 1 over at his awesome Yakuza 0 guide[gamefaqs.gamespot.com] or I'll just paste the necessary moves to make below for your convenience.

Ursprungligen skrivet av CyricZ on GameFAQs:

Move 2: Move your Rook (R) one space left.

Move 4: Move your 7th Pawn (P) from the left forward.

Move 6: Move the same Pawn again. It'll get captured.

Move 8: Move your Rook forward to capture the enemy Pawn.

Move 10: Move your Rook forward to the second row from the top. Promote or don't promote. Doesn't matter.

Move 12: Move your 3rd Pawn forward to free up your Bishop.

Move 14: Move your Bishop (B) to the very center square.

Move 16: Move your Bishop to the third row from the top, third column from the left. Promote.

Move 18: Move your Bishop one space forward to checkmate the King.

Be sure to check out the rest of CyricZ's guide for help reaching 100% (you would be amazed how much cheese there is for some of these minigames).

The rest of the guide is left as is for posterity and will show you how to beat the AI in ranked matches as well as solutions to the other challenges (kind of. you'll see).

Introduction

Winning 5 games of shogi with no take backs sounds easy enough - I mean, take backs are basically cheating anyway, how hard could it be to just win a few games of shogi without cheating?

SPOILER: IT'S VERY HARD

The shogi AI in Yakuza 0 is really good, even on the lowest difficulty. If you're like me, you don't really care for learning shogi just for one tiny little fraction of the completion list. Well my friend, I have good news for you: if you want to win those 5 games, you don't have to learn how to play shogi, you just have to learn how to make an AI play it for you.

There is a wonderful little piece of software called Shogidokoro that will tell you what moves to make to beat the AI opponent in Yakuza. I've tried a few online shogi AI, but this one is by far the easiest to use, fastest to set up, and wins most consistently (and it has an undo button!). This guide will show you how to use Shogidokoro to tiger drop Yakuza's shogi AI into Tokyo bay.

Download

You can find Shogidokoro at http://shogidokoro.starfree.jp/. Don't worry, you don't need to speak 日本語 to use it. If the download links below don't work, you can use Google Translate to navigate to the download link. Shojidokoro is very popular for computer shogi and the Lesserkai algorithm that comes with it is open source, so you can rest assured it will do you no harm.

If you have another computer you can put Shogidokoro on, I would recommend doing so since you won't have to keep tabbing out of your game to input moves while playing.

Windows/Ubuntu

You can directly download the Windows .zip here[shogidokoro.starfree.jp]. (The author of this software notes that it should work on Ubuntu using mono[shogidokoro.starfree.jp]).

Just extract the zip folder wherever and open "Shogidokoro.exe".

Mac

You can also find info on the Mac version here[shogidokoro.starfree.jp]. This link has a few notes about installing it on Mac. You can also directly download the .dmg file here[shogidokoro.starfree.jp] (Use this link[shogidokoro.starfree.jp] instead if you're running on High Sierra).

Double click the file and a window with a volume called "Shogidokoro" should open. Copy Shogidokoro into the application folder before you start using it.

A.N. - I only have Windows experience, but I would expect that the program runs pretty intuitively on other systems - though the rest of the setup is in Windows.

Setup

When you open up Shogidokoro you should get a window that looks like this.
It might look a little crazy, but don't worry, we only use like 10% of the features here.

Now, open the Engine Manager (Game -> Engine Manager...).
On the right side of the window that pops up, click "Add..." and navigate into the "Engine" folder that came with the program and select "Lesserkai.exe". You should get a message pop-up telling you that the engine has been registered and you should now see it under "Engine List".

Now, you're ready to begin.

How to win

First, if you have Shogidokoro on the same computer that you're playing Yakuza on, make sure your game is in windowed mode since it will make tabbing out and performing moves faster.

Go and start a game of shogi. Keep in mind who goes first.

Open Shogidokoro and click on "Game -> Start New Game...".

If your opponent goes first, make the Sente Human (make the name whatever you want) and the Gote Engine (set it to Lesserkai if it doesn't automatically).

If you go first, make the Sente Engine and the Gote Human.

Make sure the Starting Position is set to "Initial Position" and "Normal".

Set Available Time to 99 hours (we don't want a time limit and this is the easiest way to disable it).

Make sure your settings look like the picture on the right!

Once you're done, hit OK.

Note: The Sente goes first and the Gote second. By setting the Sente to Engine when we go first, the engine will tell us what move to make. By setting the Sente to Human when the opponent goes first, we get to copy the opponents first move as you'll see below.

If YOU go first

If the AI goes first

The main window will be updated with a new board and some other fancy things. To put things in the same orientation as the game, click on "View -> Rotate Board" or hit Ctrl+R.

Here's the general flow of things:

1. Start a game and note who goes first
   
2. Make a new game in Shogidokoro with the Sente and Gote set as shown above and with the start position to "Initial Position"
   
3. Rotate the board so that the engine is on the bottom and human on the top (we're moving the enemies pieces and the AI will take that info and choose the best move to counter it)
   
4. Take any moves that Shogidokoro performs and make those moves in Yakuza
   
5. Take any moves that your enemy in Yakuza performs and make them in Shogidokoro

Keep using Shogidokoro to figure out your moves for you and you'll have that achievement in no time!

In case you make a mistake...

If you make the wrong move in Shogidokoro by accident, you can undo your move by hitting the big 'U' above the board.

If you make the wrong move in Yakuza, you can press the 'I' above the board to interrupt the game, go into "Edit Position -> Begin Editing Position" and rearrange the pieces to fit how your board in Yakuza looks. Then you can start another game with Starting Position set to "Current Position" to resume where you left off on that board (you can set the Sente to human so that you can copy whatever your opponent just did after your accidental move into Shogidokoro). Note that you'll have to rotate the board again every time you start a game.

Challenge Mode solutions

If you're interested in completing all of the challenges in Challenge Mode (which aren't required unless you really want to do them), you can actually use Shogidokoro to solve those too. The only trick is that Shogidokoro doesn't support all of the handicap starts that Yakuza 0 uses. Now, just like the trick in Challenge 1 to get 5 wins, the challenge AI always performs the same moves if you make the same moves, but the trick here is that some of the challenges let the AI go first and the AI might make different moves each time and others require a coin toss. You can still theoretically find a single working solution for each Challenge, but I haven't gotten around to doing that for all of them yet, so for the time being you'll have to do them on your own, but don't worry, its not to hard.

A solution to Challenge 1 can be found at the top of this guide. Challenge 3 is a bit strange and trying to solve it with a Shogi AI will probably get you nowhere. Thankfully a YouTube user, 588Board, has uploaded a solution to this Challenge.

As for the others, you can run them in Shogidokoro similar to how I described using it above, but you'll have to create the board layout first. The issue with Shogidokoro's position editor is that it doesn't allow you to straight up remove pieces from the game, just give them to a player's capture pile. We can get around this using a different application called gShogi. You can find gShogi here[johncheetham.com] and download it for your platform. Yes, the download through Google Drive is a little unconventional, but the download is safe, don't worry.

Making the board is simple. Just launch gShogi, click on 'Edit -> Edit Position', and start building the board. You can click on a space to choose which piece should go there. You can change the number of pieces in a side's capture pile by right clicking the number next to the piece to increase and left clicking to decrease (its a little janky and sometimes goes up/down in 2s). Remember, you're controlling the enemy pieces so mirror their side of the board on to the bottom of the board in gShogi. You can also change which side will go first by selecting 'Black/White to Move' in the left click menu on the board. Once you're done, click on 'Edit -> Edit Position' to finish editing and go to 'File -> Save Game' to save the board as a .psn file.

Note: You might be able to run games directly in gShogi, but I can't personally vouch for its AI.

Find that .psn file on your computer, drag it into Shogidokoro to load it up, and start a game from the current position. Choose Sente and Gote based on who goes first. Every Challenge is a little bit different so you may have to play around with flipping the board, swapping the Sente and Gote, etc. to make sure the game plays out like it should.

Using this method you should be able to complete all of the Challenges. Do note that Shogi AIs like playing very carefully so you will sometimes see the AI taking turns doing absolutely nothing. If this keeps happening, try running it again or starting a different way (let the opponent move first or wait for them to make a different opening move). This is why Challenge 3 isn't possible to do in Shogidokoro.

Hopefully this helps you with the challenges!

Afterword

Using Shogidokoro, I flew through the 5 shogi matches in under 15 minutes without understanding a thing that was happening on my screen.

If, for whatever reason, you can't download Shogidokoro onto a computer, you can do basically the same thing with a shogi app on your phone or in the browser. If you set the AI difficulty to max, it will probably be able to beat whatever Yakuza throws at you, although this method is more error prone and just as easy to set up.

For those of you thinking it would be better to just use an online shogi AI to do the same thing, don't forget you're screwed if you make any mistakes copying moves and most of the ones I could find weren't able to consistently beat the easiest AI in Yakuza.

Naturally, this method also works in all of the other Yakuza games, so go wild.

If you're looking for how to beat the mahjong Completion List tasks next, dashima has an amazing mahjong tutorial in their also amazing 100% guide (their suggestion on using an app to beat shogi is what led me to find this method!). https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1667240702
Also this mod is amazing and has saved me so much time and pain. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1464245133
And of course, big thanks to the creators of Shogidokoro and the Lesserkai engine for their extremely useful software!

[Larson]

Man this didn't help for shit

[//ryve//]

THANK YOU

[Duraldo]

Unbeliable CyricZ is still doing FAQs...man. I'm old, but he's gotta be a fossil. wow

[Zamira]

alright I've really tried getting to setup gshogi but when i try to build gshogi python it says it needs the win7 sdk, which i downloaded, but that asks for net framework 4,
so i got 4.8 installed and the sdk still says I don't have net framework components, so i go forward anyway, until it says failed installation

I am trying to get challenge 9 10 and Final done. unbelievable when you try to friend to ask for help and they think you just wanna scam them so blocked

[Zamira]

yo I am trying to get through to you, all i want is just how to make gshogi work, can you answer or not block my add friend requrest pls

[Zamira]

near the end, this didn't seem to work, maybe I need pygobject which I skipped?
# enter this command
set VS100COMNTOOLS=%VS140COMNTOOLS%

# build it
c:\Python34\python.exe setup.py build

[Zamira]

Yello, how does one actually get gshogi running? The exe from google drive never seems to want to download, and the full version with all the python code, nothing runs as a GUI executable
My main gripe being Challenge 9 has way too many pawns to assemble in shogidokoro... so... can I even make that .psn?

[X3NPAI]

If you wish to get asap the completion list done, follow this video:
https://youtu [dot]be/X0Ad4gPPMWM

[The Tickle monster]

went to beat old man in sotenbori told him i am a master shogi player he beat me in 4 minutes this old man an anime protagonist you can't beat him

[The Big Mr Biggle]

got the thing, beat the guy once in the easiest difficulty, then got thrashed on the second easiest. lol, lmao